Do not go gentle

[Pillock]

I've just finally got round to finishing Episode 1, and I wanted to post some feedback and thoughts on how I found it, comparing it with the Predux version.

So yeah, there will be spoilers...

 

The most prominent thing in my mind on completing Do Not Go Gently, apart from the excellent final sequence where you shoot the bear (it feels much scarier and more visceral in 1st person mode this time around!), is Methuselah. This character can only be one of three things, as far as I can tell:
1) he is a super-natural being - a ghost, perhaps, or some kind of "Guardian Angel" for Will, a vision of God or a prophet (clue's in the name?)
2) he is a figment of Will's imagination - a hallucination brought on by a head injury from the crash or maybe an undetected infection from his hand wound, or else caused by radiation from the solar event?
3) he is a super-fit rock-climbing stealth ninja disguised as a weak old man.

In the time it took me as Will to exit the gas station - where I left Methuselah sitting quietly by his grill - walk the short distance up to the mountaineering area, quickly loot the park office, deploy the rope, descend the rope and then walk a few paces along the ridge below, this frail old man (if that's indeed what he is) must have sprinted outside, clambered over the rocks near the tunnel and down the cliff the other side without me seeing him, and then got his campfire lit and his rabbit cooked and his cup of coffee ready before I got there. The first thing Will says to him at this point is something along the lines of, "Is this what you do - hang around campfires giving advice to travelers?" The first thing I would have said is, "How the bloody hell did you get here?"

I really hope he is a ghost or a prophet or a hallucination; I really hope he isn't some kind of philosophically-minded version of Jason Bourne, or indeed a continuity flaw in the story's writing. I now fully expect to bump into him again later in the story - otherwise what was the point of his appearance at all? At Orca he doesn't give you any useful information or any tasks to carry out on his behalf; he just sits there blithely while you blatantly rob all useful supplies from his shelter! I hope his future appearances are either more plausible in terms of how he reached his new location before you arrive, or at least that Will begins to question his supposed earthly presence, or his own sanity (as I surely will).

Story continuity was the main thing I was watching out for while playing the Redux, because it was the thing that I found most problematic with the original version of Wintermute: what I did as the player didn't always match what Will said he'd been doing in the dialogue scenes, or what the other characters were talking about; the strict linearity of the plot and cutscenes just didn't fit at all well with the more free-form, open-world game that I was interacting with. The two were in opposition, it seemed to me, grinding against each other instead of complimenting.

I'm very happy to say that I found this side of things to be much improved now (though not entirely absent, unfortunately). At this point, my one outstanding message to Raphael van Lierop and the story design team about future episodes would be this: please, please make sure that the dialogue and its sequencing makes sense to the player, no matter what order they've done things or gone places in, or how long they've taken over it. If the plot and dialogue requires linearity of player actions, then don't allow us the freedom to deviate from your intended path; if you're allowing us to wander from (or around) the scripted events, make sure the dialogue is vague enough not to upend the player's immersion by contradicting their actions or assuming they've been places they haven't or not been places they have. Redux's DNGG is much, much better than Predux's in this regard, and for me it's really important that it stays that way.

Just quickly, before I go on:
- I didn't find Hobbs for 4 days after arriving in Milton; did he really survive that long with a knife sticking out of his ribs?
- Where did the knife go after I pulled it out of him? Not into my inventory, anyway. Seems like it disappeared into the ether
- Hobbs' lantern illuminated that part of the farm house indefinitely - but I wasn't allowed to repair clothes (due to darkness) unless I lit my own lantern or the fire in the stove
- Before Grey Mother has told him about the existence of the town up north, Will refers to Perseverance as a "name" 

The streamlining of the mission structure (or side-lining of the non-essential parts of it) is a triumph: it allows the initial urgency to find Astrid to be maintained, if the player chooses, whereas in Predux it was largely lost as a result of the lengthy and mandatory tutorial bit at the crash site and then Grey Mother's stubborn delaying. I can now choose to help her a lot or a little in order to progress, and that's great. I loved the new introductory sequence in the aircraft hangar - I perhaps would have liked to have been able to interact with more of the items and furniture, though - and the first meaningful choice of what to bring with me in the plane's cargo bay had me thinking quite carefully for quite some time (but in the end it's got to be the Flaregun, right?). Meaningful choices are what sets this new version apart from before. Predux had none of it; now, I feel like I can play the Story Mode again and experience it quite differently than the last time by way of which missions I choose to do, and how. It actually feels like a proper game this time - not just an animated movie where I got to look around a bit myself. I felt like I was in control of the events, not a bystander to Will's decisions, as before.

In general there seems to be much less hand-holding, fewer step-by-step instructions; but I must say that I did still find aspects of the actual 'survival game' part of the experience to be tuned a bit far to the easy side. I chose 'Hardened Survivor' because I wanted the survival aspects to be challenging while I was given the fixed objectives and told the story. I did get pretty low on health during the hike from the planecrash to Milton; but this was mostly because I being very cavalier with it and wrongly assumed certain things about what was in front of me due to experience of the previous version, and these things weren't there this time. Once I'd got to Milton and had a decent sleep to recover my condition, though, I never felt in danger from the elements again. There are virtually no wolves in the town this time - I had free range to go where I pleased - and the few wolves that were skulking about the periphery seemed oblivious to my presence, even quite close up. I had the flare gun, and I did use it a few times, but only because I had such an abundance of shells and I was feeling too lazy to be as careful as might normally be. I'm glad I took the flare gun from the hangar, because the extra food or medical supplies that I could have chosen would have been wastefully unnecessary, such is the abundance of these supplies in and around the town. I think I completed a grand total of two side-missions that involved finding extra gear, yet I found more than enough to feed, clothe and heal myself and Grey Mother for many, many more days than I would ever spend in Milton. And I never did anything that might be described as a 'survival task' other than looting houses and cars. After reaching Milton for the first time, I lit one fire in the entire rest of the episode; I killed nothing; I foraged nothing; I crafted nothing; I barely lost a single condition point; and I still left behind ample supplies in addition to completing the side-mission for Grey Mother's 'Extras'. I do expect things to get trickier in Episode 2, but I also still think it could have be cranked up here a bit more than it is. And finally, I'm afraid I really dislike the map - I don't mind having one, but I really don't want it to pin-point every location of interest for every mission like some kind of auto-updating satellite navigation system. I'm playing the hardest difficulty possible here - I don't feel that I want or need or should expect to get this much help. For a "Survival Exploration" game to marginalize both survival and exploration this much feels like a bit of a pity to me - a missed opportunity.

But that's the last negative thing I want to say about Wintermute Redux. It's fun, it's engaging and it's tense in places. There is mystery and intrigue and I want to know what happens next. Last year's version didn't achieve these things to nearly the same level for me. The characters feel like people I ought to help, rather than mandatory quest-givers who I must tolerate until I am permitted to leave them behind. I think perhaps that Grey Mother dumps rather too much information on you at your first meeting - I know you can choose to skip much of it, but I feel that it might have been better paced if this dialogue was thinned out over more time and more meetings. But I'm now really looking forward to getting stuck into Episode 2, and this time it is because I feel like I'm part of the story: I am compelled to continue the journey and find Astrid, whereas when I first played Wintermute a year or so ago it was because I wanted to get past the first-level tutorials as fast as I could and move on to what I hoped would be the good stuff, the meat of the game.

Let it be bear meat!